Fear is the first step in taking steps to compete. Its an acknowledgement of the threat from a better product. If any company doesn't have that they will fail. This can be seen during the ballmer era where he totally ignored the threat posed by iPhone and ended up conceding entire mobile os market share to Apple and Google.

Whenever questions like why are they afraid of progress, it's for common good etc come up (which I feel are based on morality) , it makes sense to imagine yourself in their shoes and see what you would do.